Robert Christensen, product manager for Adobe AIR, dropped us a line to let us know he’s responded to nearly all of the gripes listed for AIR in the replies. That’s alot responses folks! All applications should be so lucky. 
Here’s the full list of AIR gripes: http://dearadobe.com/top_rated_apps.php?a=AR. Just click on the Gripe ID numbers to see Rob’s responses.
We’ve been emailing with Kevin Connor, V.P. Product Management of Professional Digital Imaging at Adobe and he shared with us a glimpse into how Adobe’s developers are working on improving their software. Kevin writes:
A number of product teams are starting to incorporate “just do it” days into their development cycle. The idea is that the entire engineering team will take a break from their normal feature work and pick off some small product enhancements that can be implemented in a day or less. We’ve always tried to squeeze in these things where we can, but scheduling some formal days to focus on these smaller user requests will hopefully give us some extra momentum in getting them done. Dear Adobe can be one of several sources of inspiration for what things to tackle on these days.
Personally, I think this is really exciting. Looking at the gripes submitted to Dear Adobe, this is mostly what people want. They’re not pining for crazy new features, but want a program that works logically, smoothly and consistently. Here’s hoping to see the benefits of these “just do it” days soon!
UPDATE (11-12-2008):
In a follow up email, Kevin also offers some ideas about what might be fixed in these ‘just do it’ days:
Generally, they’d be things that would never make it into our top-level marketing materials, but things that existing users would notice and appreciate—minor enhancements to how existing features function, rather than entirely new features. Of course, what can really be implemented in a day is also a function of how things are coded in the first place.
He goes on to provide some examples of some things that were changed in CS4 that would probably be well suited to one of their ‘just do it’ days:
Though we didn’t schedule formal “just do it” days for the CS4 development cycle, there are a number of changes in that release that would be typical of what we might tackle this way. Some examples include:
- Changed the default color of the Stroke layer effect to black (formerly red). Ideally we would have liked to make this sticky so that it would remember your last setting, but that actually would have taken more than a day’s work to change all of the logic, and we couldn’t spare that time.
- We made a bunch of shortcut-key changes. These included freeing up the Cmd-~ shortcut so that it would be available on the Mac for application switching, and adding single-key shortcuts for moving among frames in video clips.
- The new “Bird’s Eye View” feature wasn’t exactly a user request, but it falls into the category of something an engineer was able to implement serendipitously based on some other work he was doing. It wasn’t part of our original product plan. Basically, it allows you to hold down a shortcut key to instantly zoom out to see your full image, navigate to the portion you want to see, and then release the shortcut to instantly zoom back in.
- Save for Web now has improved options for exporting metadata (while maintaining copyright info), and also can convert to sRGB directly within the dialog.
All you Illustrator fans might be interested to see an article over on Real World Illustrator where a former product manager for Illustrator took some time and wrote up some responses to the top Illustrator gripes.
via: GraphicStart